


The Water Road (Goes Ever On)

by sousverre



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Narrowboat, Bilbo is so confused, Crack, M/M, Magical Realism, Mentions of Cancer, Slow Build, Well it's a little bit crack, don't worry it's going to be all right though, that's like crack for posh people who make money off it, there's a vole in the bilges named Charlie??
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 14:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3491792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sousverre/pseuds/sousverre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>On a boat on the canal there lived a man. Not a nasty, flappy, wet sailboat, cramped with equipment and mysterious ropes and a dreadful tendency to turn over; nor yet a plastic cruiser with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: she was an English narrowboat, and that means comfort...</i>
</p><p> </p><p>When an old friend calls in a favour, Bilbo Baggins risks his home - the elderly narrowboat Bag End - to smuggle a family of fugitives in secret across Southern England. Over hill and under tree, across river, field and farm - Bilbo and his reluctant passengers are in for a ridiculous and (moderately) epic journey.</p><p>Once Bilbo gets a taste of adventure, will his hills and little rivers be enough?</p><p>(Or: A cosy slow-burn questing fic, full of natural history, folklore... and FEELINGS.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Water Road (Goes Ever On)

 

On a boat on the canal there lived a man. Not a nasty, flappy, wet sailboat, cramped with equipment and mysterious ropes and a dreadful tendency to turn over; nor yet a plastic cruiser with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was an English narrowboat, and that means comfort.

She was a long, narrow, odd-looking beast - about seven feet wide and seventy long, and brightly painted in red and green and black and gold. She had six perfectly round portholes down each side, edged in shiny yellow brass, and her wooden doors and hatches were hand-painted with roses and daisies.

Her front and back doors opened into a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel with wood-panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats, and bookshelves, and polished horse brasses, and painted china plates hung on the walls with ribbons, and round lace curtains in the portholes, and two woodstoves. This corridor went on and on: the painted boatman's cabin all in red and yellow, the engine room all full of shining brass, a bedroom with a little wardrobe, a bathroom with a full bath, a proper kitchen, the fixed dining table and the cosy little saloon with its leather armchair - all down the same passage.

The hatches opened outwards to let the world in, and the heavy glass prisms set in the ceiling let in the light. The portholes, deep-set round windows, looked out to the canal on one side; and on the other side they looked down over the man's green country, the hills scattered with little houses and wound about by the railway, and always the meadows beyond, sloping down to the river - for the flat and gentle canals keep company with the rivers of England, but are usually set on higher ground and are not prone to unseemly behavior like flooding.

This man was well-off by any standards, not just those who live on boats, and his name was Baggins.

The Bagginses had lived on narrowboats for time out of mind. In the days before trains, they worked all over England. The boats were drawn at a respectable pace by great spotted horses with feathered feet, who walked with great dignity alongside the canal. They carried wool, and corn, and wood - filling up in the great ports and hauling through the countryside, over hill and under bridge. When the trains came the Bagginses clung on; sold the horses; bypassed steam engines for diesel. They carried coal through two world wars. The family birthed their children in the close confines of boatmen's cabins, working alongside their children and marrying other boaters.

They were not bargemen - oh no! nor yet lightermen or any such unsavoury characters. No, they were boaters, and would be very insulted to have their characters impugned by comparing them to rough and rowdy bargemen. The boats were wooden, at first, and time and rot and poverty began to take them. They slowly went the way of the spotted horses and the steam trains.

And the boat that the very last Baggins lived on was the very last of them, and he was called Bilbo, and she was called Bag End. She had been re-bottomed twice, and her superstructure had been rebuilt and eventually extended by Bilbo's father to cover the entire boat; but she was still the same _Narrowboat Bag End_ as she had always been.

Bilbo himself - well, he was an odd man. He lived on his boat all the year round, and still wore waistcoats even when hardly anybody else did. He was only in his mid-thirties, but had the appearance of one much older; perhaps it was his mode of dress, which tended towards tweed and other vintage artifacts not yet resurrected by hipsters; perhaps it was the fact that he, and his life, seemed to have stepped out of time.

On a fine morning in early Spring, Bilbo was perched on his roof, sucking meditatively on a pipe and watching the world go by. Joggers pounded past on the towpath, dodging puddles, clad in the very brightest shades of Lycra. The metallic ringtone trills of blackbirds laid down a background to the dramas of all the other birds: the cawing tussles of rooks; the sweet trills of robins flirting in the hedgerows; the majestic hoots of the fat woodpigeons, clattering about clumsily in the trees overhead. Fish kissed the surface of the water from below. In the distance, the local pair of swans coughed and shook their wings at an overly curious terrier.

The resident kingfisher shimmered along the water, a flash of unworldly blue. On the far bank of the canal, a colony of small rabbits kicked at each other and sprang into the air: part fight, part foreplay, part sheer joy in being able to shed their winter coats. Bilbo knew the feeling; one of his personal quirks was the pleasure he took in being barefoot.

Underneath this whirl of colour and activity the earth smelt very green. Spring was rising in its roots, and every living thing knew what it was supposed to be doing. They had come through the winter and arrived perfectly on their marks, and were ready to begin the next act of the Great Play.

Bilbo watched and heard and smelt all of this with the calm of a man who has nowhere to be and much to observe. With magnificent calm he contemplated the spectacle of two ducks fucking. They were both drakes, but this is rarely significant to mallards, who are violent and lecherous in almost all of their daily activities. After a vigorous argument about who would be on top, the drakes had settled down to business. Now the one on the bottom was struggling to keep his head above water, protesting furiously. His squawks had attracted the interest of several female ducks, who formed an appreciative audience.

Bilbo sucked on his pipe and pondered the ineffable motives of ducks. This led him to consider his own role in the Universe, which seemed at that moment a benign and well-ordered place. The seasons changed, but still the canal remained outside of time; these same scenes and dramas had played out a hundred years ago; and, fates willing, a hundred years from now there would still be the canal, there would still be Bag End with her roses and her brasses; the willow trees still trailing their fingers in the water, the ducks still working out their personal issues in violent ways.

"Good morning," said a man on the towpath. He was an elderly-seeming gent with a marvellous grey hat; his eyes twinkled beneath the brim. Long was his beard, and grey, and he leaned on a tall carved walking stick. Generally, he appeared to be a benign old homeless man who had dressed himself from a rubbish bag left outside of a charity shop, before being dragged backwards through a holly bush by a badger.

In short, he looked like someone who lived on a boat.

"Fuck off," Bilbo said to him.

"Is that any way to speak to your oldest friend and greatest ally?"

"I know you _far_ too well, Gandalf." Bilbo scrambled to his feet, rocking unconsciously with the movement of his boat. "Go away."

Gandalf twinkled at him. It was the predatory kind of twinkle that lives under rocks and fallen trees, waiting to seize the ankles of the unwary.

"My dear Bilbo Baggins," he said, "I'm only looking for someone to share in an adventure."

Bilbo laughed so scornfully that he choked, quite ruining the effect. "Well, you'd best keep looking," he said when he'd recovered. "I still have a vole in the bilges from your last foolish plan. A vole! _In the bilges!_ And I'm still angry about Caen Hill. And that time when you whanged me in the head with a swing bridge. And when I had to climb tits-deep into a river in winter to cut a robe free from your prop. A robe!"

Gandalf waved a hand dismissively. "Such paltry concerns are beneath you, Bilbo. They ought hardly to affect our long friendship."

"Vole. In the bilges." Bilbo hissed, stabbing with the stem of his pipe for punctuation. "It's positively unhygenic. _He won't leave!_ I've named him Charlie."

"Are your bilges that damp, then?" Gandalf asked with interest.

"No! Of course not! They're as dry as old bones. I can't think what Charlie sees in them. I can't think what I see in Charlie! I _certainly_ can't think what I ever saw in you. Good day," Bilbo said, and hopped down from the roof onto the stern in preparation to disappear inside.

"Bilbo Baggins, I have something to say and I _will_ say it!" cried Gandalf in a voice like thunder. Bilbo flinched and half-turned.

Gandalf's eyes had lost their glitter. His voice dropped, and his tall form seemed to draw in on itself. "They say it's cancer."

The smaller man's shoulders dropped. Unconsciously, as if he had no idea that he was seeking the comfort, his hand went to the tiller and gripped it, his body sagging against Bag End's immovable strength. It was a long time before he looked up at his old friend, and even longer before he spoke.

"This had better not be a joke," he said eventually, his voice deceptively even. "If you are even remotely shitting me..."

"I shit you not, old friend," said Gandalf heavily. "Non-small cell lung cancer, so they say. It will ... _not_ be easily cured."

Bilbo let out a great ragged breath. He took the pipe from his mouth and put his thumb over the bowl to put it out. "Well," he said. "Well."

"I will require a little assistance."

"Oh, lord!" Bilbo jumped. "Of course you will!"

Even as his heart sank a little at the idea - living on a boat was fairly hard work, and Gandalf would require significant physical and legal assistance - Bilbo was the sort of man who secretly took real pleasure in being needed. He would frequently offer help to hire boats even if they didn't need it, jumped at the chance to help pretty young boaters hefting bags of coal, and sometimes lingered just a little too long when ambling past locks, on the off chance that someone might suddenly turn around and ask for assistance, or advice, or a bit of local history.

It would be difficult for Gandalf to remain on his boat, but certainly not impossible. Others had done so before. The main problem was the fact that Gandalf, like Bilbo, lived on a continuous cruiser license; he had no permanent home mooring, and moved about as he liked, in a large geographic area defined by Bristol to the west and London to the east. To maintain the license he had to move every two weeks, and was not allowed to settle for longer than that in any one place, nor return to any area too frequently.

As the mutters in radical boater's meetings ran, the boaters were chivvied back and forth lest the middle classes begin to feel that the travellers were becoming too comfortable; or as grumpier boaters pointed out, the inconvenience kept the young hipsters of London from becoming too attracted to the cheap and simple life, for such an influx would overwhelm the already stretched resources of the waterways. The battle between the nomadic liveaboards of Britain and the Canal and River Trust was a hotly contested one, full of ridiculous notions on both sides, and Bilbo Baggins usually kept well out of it.

It pleased him to move frequently, and his beautiful antique boat was hardly on the warden's watchlists; they preferred to plaster the gently decaying hippie craft with their angry warning notices. Of course there was more than a hint of classism involved, but Bilbo considered himself a gentleman of the very highest quality and therefore above such things. (He was mistaken of course - and not for the last time!)

But he was now presented with a quandary. To maintain his license, Gandalf would need to keep travelling, or risk losing Shadowfax, his grand old Dutch barge. Yet there would still need to be regular medical appointments, certainly at the same place; perhaps a visiting nurse - perhaps - Bilbo's heart sinking all the way to the bottom of his bare feet - hospice care.

It could be done. It could all be done. It would have to be done. To think of Gandalf leaving the canal - to think of Shadowfax falling into ruin, or taken on by somebody else - well, it was literally unthinkable, that was what it was.

"I've not got a car, of course," Bilbo sighed. "But we'll rally everyone round. You'll not - well." He fiddled with his pipe. "You're not without friends here."

"So I can count on you, then?" The twinkle had returned. 

"Of course you can, Gandalf. Count on me for anything you need."

 

####

 

Crusty bread, sharp cheddar, hard sausage cut with a pocketknife, and the last of the runner bean chutney: summer trapped in a jar. Bilbo sat down to his cold supper with pleasure.

Night drew around him like a robe. It was still bitter-cold in the evenings, the year balancing between frost and flower, but glowing orange coals shifted peaceably in the woodstove, and in the blue-black dark of the countryside, Bag End was an oasis of warmth and light. Outside, a swan tapped on the boat just below the waterline, foraging for all those interesting things that grow on the bellies of boats - snails and green weeds.

His was a small life, but it felt whole and significant. His expenses were negligible - Bag End was mostly self-supporting, and her consumables were fairly cheap - and how many men in their mid-thirties in the UK could live so comfortably without needing to work in an office every day? There were so few others with this privilege on the crowded little island - or anywhere else, really.

Of course, it helped that he got fairly good wifi on the boat, so he wasn't as lonely as he might have been otherwise. And the free healthcare - that helped too. And the fact that wherever he moored was usually within walking distance of a pub, and mostly within walking distance of a train...

But still, to live on a boat, one had to be happy with relatively little; Navy showers, a living space barely seven feet wide, little room for excess possessions or flamboyant hobbies, limited electricity in the winter and the year-long willingness to go to bed when the batteries began to run low, the vagaries of acquiring a good deal of one's power from solar panels in a country known for constant rain, the inevitability of emptying the toilet tank every five weeks.

And, of course, Bag End had a personality that was uniquely her own; if you spoke too sharply to her, she would retaliate by going "bang" at precisely the wrong time and then demanding hundreds of pounds in repairs, usually in the form of a mysterious tiny brass twiddly bit, which she would appreciate for about five seconds before knocking it into the bilges and then carrying on as if nothing had ever happened.

Occasionally Bilbo felt flashes of yearning for more in his life; perhaps one in which he had a pet or even a partner. Sometimes, out of the corner of his imagination, he might almost believe that he had someone else. He sometimes wished to make two cups of tea, or lay a table for two. But Bag End was company by herself - friend and home and vehicle and lifestyle - and one could always go to the pub if the loneliness pressed down too heavily.

The tap-tap of the browsing swan increased, but it seemed to come from the stern door. Bilbo frowned. If the swans had developed such ambitions, he was well and truly fucked.

"Hello?" he called.

The knock definitely sounded human. It wasn't unusual for boaters to receive strange visitors in the dark - usually other liveaboard boaters who had lost an important twiddly bit of their own and wished to borrow Bilbo's Excellent Bilge Magnet; occasionally, holiday boaters with no sense of propriety would come crashing into the neighbors, demanding corkscrews. Bilbo set down his cheese, noted the locations of his hatchet and fire extinguisher, in case he needed to repel boarders, and went to answer the door.

A pair of far-too-cheerful young faces peered down at him. Two young men crouched on the stern counter, goggling happily as if they were staring into the burrow of some creature previously unknown to science. One was dark and one was fair; they had the beards and hair and plaid checked shirts of Vermont lumberjacks, and were thus most likely from Camden. Bilbo boggled back.

"Hello!"

"What a nice boat!"

"We're Fili and Kili."

"Is this the right boat?"

"Probably not!" Bilbo said in utter honesty, but that cursed spirit of helpfulness rose up in him, and he said "Which boat are you looking for?"

"Isn't this Bag End?"

"He said it was Bag End."

"Isn't it Tuesday?"

"We thought it was Tuesday."

Bilbo caught the thread of the conversation like a heron spearing a single fish in a shoal. "This is Bag End."

"Ah, _but is it Tuesday_?"

"Possibly?" Bilbo hazarded, not having much use for days of the week.

"Well then!" The boys looked at him expectantly. "Can we come in?"

"I suppose you'd better had." Bilbo resorted to stuffy incoherence and moved aside so that the boys could stumble into the narrow passage. And stumble they did - narrowboats have reasonably high ceilings once one is inside, but to enter their low doors one must step down a series of shallow stairs, canting one's head to the side - or one's upper body if one is tall.

The dark-haired one was nearly short enough to make it comfortably, but he rushed it, braining himself on the doorway and falling abruptly onto Bilbo's bed. Then, unbelievably, the fair-haired one repeated the same action. They wiggled like overturned turtles on Bilbo's candlewick duvet.

" _Lovely_ bed," the dark-haired one said weakly. "Wow, it's just like a real bedroom! But - small!"

"This is incredible - it doesn't look possible from outside! It looks like a toy boat." The fair-haired one seemed to have recovered from his near-concussion (definitely students, Bilbo decided). "It's like a TARDIS-"

"Bigger on the inside," Bilbo finished. "People do say that."

"Sorry, we're being terribly rude."

"Fili and Kili, at your service."

"It's a _really nice_ boat."

"Is he here yet?"

Bilbo's expression cleared, as if a gentle wind had come to brush the thunderclouds from his forehead. "Let me guess," he said distantly. "Gandalf."

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written fic in years, and I'm feeling terribly insecure and lonely, so using the kudos button would be a kindness.
> 
> I'm kind of aiming for a cosy slow-burn romance-novel feel, full of birdlife and FEELINGS. This may or may not be successful.
> 
> Narrowboats are virtually unknown outside of the United Kingdom, but they are fundamentally hobbitish, oddly steampunk, beloved of hippies and reenactors, and very reminiscent of _Serenity_ \- so I think it's time we dragged them into fandom. Bag End looks something like this:
> 
>  


End file.
